Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World - Softcover

Fishkin, Rand

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593853962 ISBN 13: 9780593853962

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love.

Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world.

This is not that story.

It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque. His company, Moz, maker of marketing software, is now a $45 million/year business, and he's one of the world's leading experts on SEO. But his business and reputation took fifteen years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt.

Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: A minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment. Growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour, but initiatives can fizzle quickly. Revenue and growth won't protect you from layoffs. And venture capital always comes with strings attached.

Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rand Fishkin, aka the Wizard of Moz, is co-founder and former CEO of Moz, host of Whiteboard Friday, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. This is his first solo book.

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Chapter 1

The Truth Shall Set You Free (from a lot of $#*% storms)

You've got an interesting business, but we don't believe it will ever get past a few million dollars in revenue.

-Anonymous Investor I Pitched in 2009

In 2005, my coworker Matt and I were working in a run-down, shared office space above a noisy movie theater in Seattle when he walked in. A hairy, barrel-chested, fortysomething guy with gold chains, a mean grimace, and a stack of papers in a folder stared down at me.

He asked, "Are you Rand Fishkin?"

I was twenty-five years old, disoriented by his arrival, intimidated by his appearance and tone, and utterly panicked. I'm usually a terrible liar, so was taken aback by how quickly a response left my mouth:

"Sorry, I don't think he's here."

We exchanged a few more words, but I remember none of them. My heart was pounding. I hated lying, but I also had no idea what might happen if I identified myself. Matt just put on his headphones and pretended to be engrossed in whatever website he was working on. When the extra from The Sopranos left, I called Gillian, president of our three-person firm (who also happens to be my mom). I told her about the unexpected visitor. She guessed he was a debt collector, sent by one of the firms to whom a bank had sold our debt.

Oh, right. The debt. The $500,000 we owed, in my name, to finance our struggling consulting business.

Ten minutes after I returned to my apartment (actually, Geraldine's apartment-I was unable to pay my half of rent with my sometimes tiny, sometimes nonexistent paychecks, and couldn't pass a credit check, either), I heard a knock on the door. Assuming it was Geraldine carrying something she didn't want to put down to turn the key, I opened up without looking through the peephole.

It was the debt collector.

"Ha! Gotcha," he said.

I was mute.

"You're pretty good, kid. I totally bought that act today. . . ."

Scared senseless, I just stared at him.

He handed me the folder of papers I'd seen in his hands earlier and said, "Rand Fishkin, you've been served."

I couldn't even reach out to take them. He dropped them on the ground and walked away.

Oops, I Accidentally a Startup

In the summer of 2000, I was twenty-one with a year of college to go at the University of Washington in Seattle. I'm one of those lucky kids whose parents paid his tuition so he could "focus on his studies, not on work."

That is, until I got into a fight with my dad and he threatened to cut me off. I was too prideful and stubborn to back down, apologize, or reconcile, so, for the next two quarters, I had to pay my own way.

I worked part-time at the Wizards of the Coast Game Center, a giant arcade, gaming events center, and retail shop around the corner from campus. My $4.75/hour salary was supplemented by buying PokŽmon cards with my employee discount and reselling them on eBay and Craigslist for a tidy profit. I designed and built a few websites on the side for some extra cash. And, thankfully, in the early 2000s, college tuition hadn't yet skyrocketed past the point of absurdity. A full quarter, including books, only cost around $3,000-a sum I scraped together while still managing to have enough to go out to the movies, buy the occasional used video game, and pay the rent on my small, shared apartment.

But two classes away from graduating, I threw in the towel. Part of it was the cost, part of it was the lack of value I perceived from school, but a lot of it was because of a failed romantic relationship (long distance + breakup = broken heart). I wish I could say entrepreneurship was the catalyst for dropping out, but the truth is the other way around. I wallowed in a little self-misery, watched a lot of X-Files reruns, and only then realized I needed something to do besides work retail. Web design was my path of least resistance.

In 1981, my mom, Gillian, started a marketing consultancy in Seattle, helping small businesses with their logos, Yellow Page ads, brochures, and other print and advertising materials. In the late 1990s, her clients started asking for websites, and she recruited me to learn FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and HTML so I could help out. I liked the work, and the extra money, and when I told my mom I wanted to work with her full-time and not go back to college, she obliged.

Over the summer of 2001, we dreamed big. Seattle's tech scene was booming in Microsoft's backyard. Startups like Amazon, Kozmo, and HomeGrocer dominated the local news. Everyone was switching from slow, dial-up modems to high-speed broadband. We thought we had an amazing opportunity to design sites for local businesses that needed a presence on the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Internet. When the dot-com crash hit, I barely noticed. Our clients still needed websites, and I didn't pay much attention to the falling prices, the late payments, or the commoditization of web design.

For the next three years, we struggled against increasing competition, pervasive doubt about the web's future, the challenges of getting our clients to pay their bills on time, and, worst of all, our own foolish beliefs about what would help our company grow. We were trying to sell our services in a crowded marketplace without a competitive differentiator. We wasted money on advertising that didn't bring in business. We leased high-priced office space, convinced that an impressive building would help us close deals. We hired contractors and employees who didn't work out. We rented booth space at events that didn't even pay for themselves. And, worst of all, we went into debt to do it.

When I started working with my mom, she had a small amount of debt on the business-less than $20,000 in total. But three years later, we'd amassed an additional $100,000 of debt, much of it from the aforementioned missteps. The great thing about a consulting business is supposed to be the low-capital requirements-smart operators often make their consultancies profitable from day one. We went the other direction, and in 2004, after we'd failed to secure yet another client project we thought could put us on the path to success, we defaulted.

It's hard today to imagine the pre-2008-financial-crisis world of personal debt, where banks would extend loans of $50-$100,000 to a college dropout with a tiny salary. At the time, credit card offers arrived almost weekly, promising $10,000 limits that would quickly rise to $15,000 or $20,000. Lending institutions were happy to offer us lines of credit and equipment loans despite our meager track record and nonexistent collateral. Promotional interest rates in the < 2 percent range were available for the first two to three years of an account. Seduced by these offers and in desperate need of cash just to make payroll and rent for three people, we went whole hog, racking up a balance that eventually came back to bite us.

We took out loans and put them in my name because I had, at the time, nothing to lose. My mom had her and my dad's assets on the line. They owned not only their home in Seattle's suburbs but my grandmother's house in Connecticut as well, which could have also been on the chopping block as collateral. So it was my social security number and my signature on the loans-something that, at the time, didn't really scare me....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593853962
• ISBN 13: 9780593853962
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar